INTUITION • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Intuition

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/ˌɪntuˈɪʃən/ Listen

noun

Intuition n.

1.

A looking after; a regard to. (Obs.) "What, no reflection on a reward! He might have an intuition at it, as the encouragement, though not the cause, of his pains."

2.

Direct apprehension or cognition; immediate knowledge, as in perception or consciousness; distinguished from "mediate" knowledge, as in reasoning; as, the mind knows by intuition that black is not white, that a circle is not a square, that three are more than two, etc.; quick or ready insight or apprehension. "Sagacity and a nameless something more, let us call it intuition."

3.

Any object or truth discerned by intuition.

4.

Any quick insight, recognized immediately without a reasoning process; a belief arrived at unconsciously; often it is based on extensive experience of a subject.

5.

The ability to have insight into a matter without conscious thought; as, his chemical intuition allowed him to predict compound conformations without any conscious calculation; a mother's intuition often tells her what is best for her child.

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Etymology of 'Intuition'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Intuition" Quotes from Famous Books

... pre-determined their field of vision, and to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward experience, a clearer intuition than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very act of poetic composition. As intuitively ...

— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books, no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts. There ...

— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... the masquerade; on which, however ill-founded his imagination might be, he had voluptuously feasted during the whole day, the evening no sooner came than Mr Jones began to languish for some food of a grosser kind. Partridge discovered this by intuition, and took the occasion to give some oblique hints concerning the bank-bill; and, when these were rejected with disdain, he collected courage enough once more to mention a return to ...

— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... is that of a law of coexistence, an intuition of the universal conscience, which all human society upholds by reason of the sole fact ...

— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a current quite strange to it. She did not understand him, and she did. Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy. He was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose family was great. He belonged among people of gentle birth and high attainments. She magnified him so that ...

— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

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